Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J Mehler.
4-day-old infants from French-speaking families were examined for their ability to discriminate French from Russian sentences. The infants gave evidence of discrimination as well as preference for French.
Some recent experiments suggest that only open class words show a frequency effect. Closed class items are accessed independently of their frequency. We carried out five experiments to test the validity of this hypothesis for the French language. All our results suggest that the frequency effect applies equally well to the open and closed class items.
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Initial state dispositions in the new-born infant allow him/her to perceive linguistically pertinent speech differences in a manner comparable to that of adults. The specificity of language processing based on the categorical perception of speech stimuli is questioned. Our studies are now oriented towards defining the status of the syllable as a perceptive unit in language. A further area of research is proposed, based on the study of the supra-segmental properties of language on which the infant can base his recognition of the speaker.
Three experiments are reported in which rapid sequential visual presentation of sentences--RSVP--was used to determine some perceptual processes in sentence perception. It was found that adjectives, when they are actually or potentially modifiers of a noun, are far less likely to be reported than any other part of the sentence. On the other hand, adjectives which are attribute adjectives are as likely to be reported as any other part of the sentence. Conclusions are drawn concerning sentence perception in general.
Each of a group of one-month-old infants was reinforced, contingent upon nonutritive sucking, with its mother's voice and the voice of a stranger. In this experiment, two conditions were applied. Under the first, the mother's speech was aimed at communicating with the infant, while, under the second, the mother's speech lacked prosodic and intonational aspects of normal speech. It was shown that infants will suck more for their mother's voices under the intonanted condition only. It was concluded that a young infant prefers its own mother's voice provided the mother speaks normally.
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New studies support the hypothesis that young children have basic cognitive capacities but utilize them inefficiently; older children aid these capacities with generally valid cognitive heuristics which produce poor performance on critical problems.
Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly. The discriminative ability of the younger children shows that the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than previously acknowledged.
Infants acquire whatever language is spoken in the environment into which they are born. The mental capability of the newborn child is not biased in any way towards the acquisition of one human language rather than another. Because psychologists who attempt to model the process of language comprehension are interested in the structure of the human mind, rather than in the properties of individual languages, strategies which they incorporate in their models are presumed to be universal, not language-specific. In other words, strategies of comprehension are presumed to be characteristic of the human language processing system, rather than, say, the French, English, or Igbo language processing systems. We report here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not by native speakers of English.
Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In Experiment 1, infants heard bisyllabic versus trisyllabic words (e.g.: iga vs. hekiga); in Experiment 2, they were presented with bimoraic versus trimoraic bisyllabic words (e.g.: iga vs. iNga). The results corroborate those obtained by Bijeljac-Babic, Bertoncini, and Mehler (1993), providing further evidence that neonates discriminate bisyllabic from trisyllabic words. In contrast, neonates do not appear to discriminate bisyllabic words that vary in number of sub-syllabic units. It is proposed that syllables are particularly salient units during the initial stage of speech processing, irrespective of which language and rhythmical structure is heard.
Sign language has only recently become a topic of investigation in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. In this paper, we review research from these two fields; in particular, we compare spoken and signed language by looking at data concerning either cortical representations or early acquisition. As to cognitive neuroscience, we show that clinical neuropsychological data regarding sign language is partially inconsistent with imaging data. Indeed, whereas both clinical neuropsychology and imagery show the involvement of the left hemisphere in sign language processing, only the latter highlights the importance of the right hemisphere. We discuss several possible interpretations of these contrasting findings. As to psycholinguistics, we survey research on the earliest stages of the acquisition of spoken language, and consider these stages in the acquisition of sign language. We conjecture that under favorable circumstances, deaf children exploit sign input to gain entry into the language system with the same facility as hearing children do with spoken input. More data, however, are needed in order to gain a fuller understanding of the relation of different kinds of natural languages to both the underlying anatomical representations and their early acquisition.
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